"An early affection for tossing pots on the wheel led her to graduate school... where she studied both ceramics and sculpture with Peter Voulkos... who believed in subjecting clay to Abstract Expressionist theatrics."

"As Ms. Heilmann later recalled, Mr. Voulkos liked to walk across the classroom holding a homemade pot, then trip (or rather, as she said, 'fake trip'), with the pot smashing on the floor. He would collect the broken shards and assemble them into a surprisingly interesting sculpture. Ms. Heilmann’s own early sculptures, which consisted of ragged-looking objects constructed from inexpensive craft-shop materials like plastic clay, tin foil, cotton balls, bamboo and glitter, similarly sought to foreground the process of their making."

From "Mary Heilmann, Painter of Vividly Wobbly Abstractions, Dies at 86/An emblem of the obstacles faced by women artists of her generation, she was 67 when her first museum retrospective opened to rave reviews in 2007" (NYT gift link).

ADDED: Something about the attitude in the comments here made me remember a line from the movie "Blue Moon":

She’s a college student. Sophomore. Yale. Not the general school; that’s for the guys. This is the School of Fine Arts! Bohemian goddesses in gray smocks mixing paint in morning light. She’s all of twenty years old.

I bought the screenplay so I could quote that. (I highly recommend that movie, by the way. It's the most like "My Dinner with Andre" that I've ever run across: An unusual man talks about theater for a long time. Catch it on Netflix.)

I do appreciate the commenters focusing on the phrase "An emblem of the obstacles."

"The people who want AI to be off-limits are right that technology changes how you think and write."

"I am old enough to have done creative writing in longhand and then on a typewriter, before I got my first computer. Something was lost in each transition, because the slowness and forced rewriting of the old methods improved the text in certain ways. But they also raised the cost (in time and effort) of making changes, and ultimately most writers decided the new ways were worth it.... There will be artisanal holdouts who reject all those possibilities, but I doubt they’ll be a majority. So for the foreseeable future, the rest of us will be figuring out where to draw the lines, knowing that some lines will be crossed by others, if not erased entirely. The best we can hope for is that in the struggle to draw and redraw them, we’ll learn where they belong...."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "I told the internet I use AI. Boy, was it mad. Artificial intelligence helps you work harder, instead of just outsourcing your brain" (WaPo).

ADDED: I write so I can see what I think. I asked Grok, "Has anyone ever said, verbatim, 'I write so I can see what I think.'" The answer, I'm told, is no, but there's a similar expression, examined in the Quote Investigator article, "Quote Origin: I Do Not Know What I Think Until I Read What I’m Writing."

Notably, Flannery O'Connor wrote, in 1948: "What you say about the novel, Rinehart, advances, etc. sounds very good to me, but I must tell you how I work. I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again." So there was this mythic "old lady" who seems to have been regarded as a fool. In 1927, E. M. Forster wrote of an old lady who said, "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?"

Why am I writing this as a postscript to McArdle's discussion of A.I.? It's because it explains something about how I've been using A.I.

"The most new York couple is: very sweet man that everyone loves with a wife way out of his league that he’s obsessed with."

That's the top rated comment on this TikTok about Rama Duwaji, the wife of Zohran Mamdani:

"Mamdani’s artist wife skips mayoral debate to teach ceramics class in trendy Brooklyn bistro."

I love that headline... in the NY Post.

The $95-a-ticket workshop began at 5 p.m. and ended at 7:30 p.m. — a half hour after Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa took to the debate stage.... The workshop was set to focus on “fruit iconography with damascene tile design,” where participants would design their “own ceramic tiles to take home”....

Rama Duwaji was scheduled to teach people who'd paid $95 for the experience and to take home a tile on which they'd painted some fruit. Sounds like a children's birthday party idea, but okay. She has a life of her own. She's not just some little woman sitting there, gazing at her man from the audience.

ADDED: I don't want to seem to belittle Damascene tiles, so here you can see a tile panel from the Metropolitan Museum collection, made in the Ottoman province of Syria, 16th/17th century.

"Finding a studio that made her 'feel comfortable enough to be creative' took time, she said, and eventually, she found Pot, a studio in Los Angeles that seeks to empower people of color in ceramics."

"'In that studio, I met a lot of people that help me feel safe and feel able to create whatever I want without thinking: Am I going to sell this or is this going to be something that people are going to want in their stores?' said Ms. Muñoz, who now lives in El Paso and has a studio in Guadalajara, Mexico."

From "That Art Piece on Your Coffee Table? It’ll Get You High. Cannabis paraphernalia is joining the world of home décor. Here are some of the most interesting new designs and designers" (NYT)(free-access link).

I'm expending one of my 10 gift links on this one because I want you to see some of the godawful pottery the NYT is promoting for artists and empowerers of people of color. I found this article at the top of the NYT home page, right next to "Trump Favors Blunt Force in Dealing With Foreign Allies and Enemies Alike." No pun intended, I'm sure.

I'm old enough to remember the kind of gigantic atrocious ashtray that was regarded as an "art piece on your coffee table," back in the heyday of tobacco smoking. 

Smoking paraphernalia "joined the world of home decor" a long time ago.  

By the way, did you ever look and look and finally find a place where people helped you feel safe and feel able to create whatever you want without thinking and then you relocated to Mexico?

Now, get out there and be creative. Creative for the people. Of color. Perhaps orange. Or avocado....

"Clay is the opposite of the cellphone. This stuff is real, takes up space, it’s dirty. There’s just this physicality..."

"... that is very different from what we experience six or eight hours a day sitting in front of a computer."

Said  D. Wayne Higby, director of Ceramic Art Museum at Alfred University, quoted in "Get Lost in Clay, Even if It’s Just for the Weekend/Pottery workshops like those at the Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts in Maine are filling up with people who want to connect with others instead of screens" (NYT).

What are you doing these days to get your fair share of physicality"?

I know it's not very physicalistic of me, but I looked up "physicality" in the OED. The relevant meaning is #3: "The awareness of the body or of bodily sensation; a bodily function or experience." And: "the quality of being physically demanding; physical intensity; strong physical presence or appeal." Here are the quotes to orient you:

"[S]he interrogates her love of the flowered Czech dishes she inherited and then realized bear some resemblance to ones that belonged to Hitler’s companion, Eva Braun."

Writes Lily Meyer in "A Better Way of Buying—And Wanting—Things/A new book argues that we should honor our material desires rather than feeling ashamed of them" by  (The Atlantic)(reviewing the book "The Ugly History of Beautiful Things" by Katy Kelleher).

I'm just "obsessed" with the insincere use of "obsessed" and the way WaPo seems to think 2-syllable words are "monosyllabic."

I'm trying to read "How ‘live, laugh, love’ and Rae Dunn took over American homes/Consumers love decorating with words and sayings. Rae Dunn pottery is the latest craze. Why are we so obsessed?" (WaPo).

“I am a very quiet and super-shy person,” says Dunn, now 60 and living in Berkeley. “I pretty much have always distilled what I had to say out loud down to using the least amount of words possible.” She started inscribing plates, bowls, mugs and vases with verbs like “dream,” “focus” and “begin” — monosyllabic aspirations for her own life. 

I was surprised to see this in WaPo, published today, not 10 years ago. This stuff has been a laughing stock for years. I've seen TikToks that are just some young adult wandering around the family home pointing to the various words the mother has affixed to the wall and lined up on shelves and counters. WaPo is taking it seriously? Why? Because Dunn looks kind of cool at the potter's wheel and lives in Berkeley?

Blueberries.

At the Clay Pot Café...

... you can talk about anything.

"[T]he Bolsheviks, under Vladimir Lenin, took control of this symbol of tsarist decadence" — The Imperial Porcelain Manufactory — and renamed it the State Porcelain Manufactory, "seeing surprising potential in it..."

"...  as a wheelhouse for artistic innovation and the production of propaganda. Stocks of unpainted, snow-white china became a tantalising canvas for avant-garde artists keen to express their utopian ideologies and rouse enthusiasm for the new socialist era, giving this delicate, bourgeois material an unexpected, almost contradictory, second life.... Agitation porcelain, as it became known, featured effigies of Lenin and was decorated with calls to action.... [C]rockery once intended for the lavish feasts of the Romanovs was now emblazoned with militant Reds trampling upon their white ermine furs (Adamovich, 1923). Danko's porcelain chess set (1923) used the same colour play, with a red army taking on a white skeleton king whose proletariat pawns are in chains. While the porcelain plates' blocky constructivist artwork conveyed energy, explosions and destruction, the requisitioning of the factory was part of a softer approach to demonstrate the communists' respect for Russian patrimony, and ingratiate the precarious new regime with the powerful upper-middle classes whose support they depended on in order to govern."

From "How teapots were used to spread Russian propaganda" (BBC).

The most marital answer ever to the old question "You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?"

From the novelist Geraldine Brooks, interviewed by the NYT:

First, I would bring back [my late husband] Tony Horwitz, because he was more fun at a dinner party than anyone I know. Then, because I think it’s rather rude — and a little dull — to invite writers without their partners, I would have my fellow Australian Tim Winton and his wife, Denise, who is a marine scientist. I’d add Margaret Atwood and bring back her partner, Graeme Gibson, a passionate conservationist.

You could have anyone. You could have Shakespeare or Dickens. But you're going to have Margaret Atwood's husband, "a passionate conservationist." I wonder what's the conservationist position about bringing people back from the dead. But the only person she exercised her resurrection power on was her own husband.

Ostracon and ostraconophobia.

Ostraconophobia:

Ostraconophobia is the fear of shellfish.[1]

NASCAR driver Denny Hamlin has this phobia. On July 16, 2017, after winning the Overton's 301 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, he was given a 44-pound lobster by crew chief Mike Wheeler (a trophy that is traditionally given to winners at the track), and Hamlin attempted to leap away. "I have a lobster phobia. I don't know why. I just don't like them," Hamlin stated. "I cannot eat dinner if someone beside me is eating lobster. I can't look at it. So as far as I'm concerned, they need to put it back in the water and let it live."[2]

Ostracon:

An ostracon (Greek: ὄστρακον ostrakon, plural ὄστρακα ostraka) is a piece of pottery, usually broken off from a vase or other earthenware vessel. In an archaeological or epigraphical context, ostraca refer to sherds or even small pieces of stone that have writing scratched into them. Usually these are considered to have been broken off before the writing was added; ancient people used the cheap, plentiful and durable broken pieces of pottery around them as convenient places to place writing for a wide variety of purposes, mostly very short inscriptions, but in some cases very long....

In Classical Athens, when the decision at hand was to banish or exile a certain member of society, citizen peers would cast their vote by writing the name of the person on the shard of pottery; the vote was counted and, if unfavorable, the person was exiled for a period of ten years from the city, thus giving rise to the term ostracism....

What's going on here? The etymology of "ostracon" (from the OED) explains it: 

Etymology: < ancient Greek ὄστρακον earthen vessel, potsherd, hard shell < the same Indo-European base as the word for bone (see osteo- comb. form), with an -r- suffix (shown also by ancient Greek ὄστρειον oyster n.).

"In Mississippi in 1947, two Black teenagers asked for fried chicken and watermelon before they went to the electric chair. Professor Green painted one ornate platter for each boy."

From "Julie Green, Artist Who Memorialized Inmates’ Last Suppers, Dies at 60/For more than two decades, she rendered death row prisoners’ requests for a last meal on a series of plates, bringing a human face to capital punishment" (NYT). 

She planned to paint the meals until capital punishment was abolished, or until she had made 1,000 plates, whichever came first. In September, she painted her 1,000th plate, an oval platter with a single familiar image: the bottle of Coca-Cola requested by a Texas man in 1997. She died a few weeks later....

The plates are white china with the image of the food done in cobalt blue glaze. She got the idea to do this project when she read about a man whose last meal choice was glazed doughnuts. The obituary writer does not note the glaze/glaze inspiration/coincidence. It's just put there for us to see.

Nor does the obituary discuss race, even though — out of all those 1,000 plates — one of the choices it highlights is the fried chicken and watermelon that 2 black teenagers wanted. For many years, it has seemed verboten to mention fried chicken or watermelon in connection with black people. What is it about this context that made it seem okay?

Is it just that Julie Green — who looks white in the photograph — has died? Is it that she meant to express empathy for the condemned? But she systematically commemorated any condemned person who was given a meal choice. The obituary chose which examples to isolate. I was surprised to see this breach of taboo.

The author of the obituary is the NYT style writer Penelope Green. No relation to Julie Green, I presume. I see I have a tag for Penelope Green, and I see that I have especially enjoyed her writing — about Marie Kondo (here), Cat Marnell (here), and new urban communal living, blogged here: "And another thing I like about Penelope Green is: She put 'social justice' in quotes." 

I wonder what Penelope Green really thought about Julie Green's art project. An obituary writer can't inject criticism. Or can she?

"Helpfully, the fashion for ladies to wear white gloves during the tea service and even bleach their hands porcelain-white with arsenic also increased demand for black-basalt teaware, as the darkness of the basalt highlighted the cleanliness of the hostesses’ wardrobe or the purity of their genealogy."

Writes Tristram Hunt, in “The Radical Potter," quoted in "A Transporting and Cozy Biography of a Pottery Pioneer" (NYT).

"But there was one thing TikTok was getting wrong: TikTok thought I was … a lesbian?"

"If you happen to be unfamiliar with the app, know this: You are no match for TikTok’s algorithm. By way of sorcery, TikTok learns your every interest, tendency, and pattern based on how you interact with its content, even if that’s just watching a video mostly through. What that means is TikTok knows you better than you know yourself. And it will show you more of what you like, even if you didn’t know you liked it yet. For me, I can only assume it started with lingering on a video of a gay pop star. So? I like her music. Then came the thirst traps, then the thrift hauls. I mean, I also like rocking a secondhand Carhartt pant, so?! Next came the the 'Disaster Bisexuals,' 'Gay Panics,' and 'Hey Mamas.' All of a sudden, almost every video on my For You page included a 'Woman Loving Woman' hashtag. I was confused and yet somehow … more addicted than ever? I’m not gay, I thought, but these lesbians are like…  really hot. Then one fated night... the Most Subtly Pornographic Video ever.... Our protagonist sits at a pottery wheel, drops a mound of clay on its surface, and begins molding it into a cup or hollow vessel of sorts. She looks seductively at the camera, mouth ajar, as we cut to a close-up of her hands where she slowly (extremely slowly!) shoves two fingers into the too-wet clay. I let the video loop again and again....  Painful as it is to think doom-scrolling AI-selected content was the thing that alerted me to my years of internalized homophobia and vicious cycle of self-hate, boy am I thrilled I downloaded that stupid fucking app."

 
From "TikTok Made Me Gay" by Emma Turetsky (The Cut).

Are you one of the thousands of Americans who are thinking "Ningbo?!! Never heard of it!" this morning?

It's a city of almost 10 million people. Don't you think it's odd that there are cities on this earth that large that you have never heard of, whose names sound like sheer nonsense? 

The first character in the city's name ning (宁 or 寧) means "serene", while its second character bo (波) translates to "wave"... It was once named Mingzhou (明州; Míngzhōu). The first character (明) is composed of two parts, representing two lakes inside the city wall: the Sun Lake (日湖) and the Moon Lake (月湖) dating back to Tang Dynasty 636 AD. Today, only the Moon Lake remains, and the old Sun Lake dried up in 19 century...

Ningbo is one of China's oldest cities, with a history dating to the Jingtou Mountain Culture in 6300 BC and Hemudu culture in 4800 BC. Ningbo was known as a trade city on the silk road at least two thousand years ago, and then as a major port for foreign trade along with Yangzhou and Guangzhou in the Tang Dynasty, and Quanzhou and Guangzhou in the Sung dynasty.

If you don't know why Ningbo is nagging at us this morning....

"One of the things we’re trying to push back hard against is reading his work in terms of the benevolence of his enslavers, assuming his owner taught him to write or gave him permission. There’s a risk that his story becomes a tonic to the cruelty of slavery."

Said Ethan Lasser, head of Art of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, quoted in "The Enslaved Artist Whose Pottery Was an Act of Resistance/Poetic jars by David Drake are setting records at auction and starring in art museums, showcasing the artistry of enslaved African Americans" (NYT).

"Roswell finally outed himself as rich when he volunteered to front the travel costs for a group of Oberlin students who wanted to attend a climate-change conference."

"That’s when two housemates told him about an organization called Resource Generation (RG). A nonprofit group based in New York, Resource Generation focuses on organizing wealthy young people to recognize their unearned privilege, make peace with it — and then relinquish much of it by giving away a large percentage of their money.... At conferences, in webinars and in local working groups, and through RG books and peer-to-peer mentorship, members learn how to shed entitled assumptions. One bedrock Resource Generation practice is educating members to work closely with community organizations in what it calls 'right relationship' — not dictating how donated funds should be used, but supporting local leaders, who are often poor or working class and are closest to the problems they seek to address.... According to Roswell, his mother, for one, worries that he is moving too quickly, making reckless decisions about enormous sums.... 'I think the mirror I’ve been holding up has been helpful, and that my family is changing how they’re approaching their own giving.' Ultimately, however, philanthropy’s real goal, he says, should be 'to make itself not exist anymore.'"

From "The Millennials Who Want to Get Rid of Their Class Privilege/Their families built fortunes. These young people joined a group that coaches them on how to give the money away" (WaPo).

Photographs at the link include one with the caption "Resource Generation member David Roswell and girlfriend Maggie Heraty at his kiln in Durham, N.C." But there was nothing in the article about his kiln. Nothing other than the note that "in addition to his political organizing [he] spends his days working as a ceramist." Is "ceramist" (i.e, potter) his career or is it some pastime or affectation? I think it would be nice to have secure independent wealth and to "spend one's days" doing pottery but difficult to rid yourself of all your wealth and depend on pottery for a living.

So what was the Christmas present from Kim Jong-Un? Was it, as Trump guessed, a beautiful vase?

I saw the news 2 days ago:

President Trump did not seem concerned Tuesday when asked about the threat of a "Christmas present" from North Korea if the U.S. doesn't roll back economic sanctions on the country by the end of the year.

"Maybe it's a nice present," Trump told reporters at an event at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. "Maybe it's a present where he sends me a beautiful vase, as opposed to a missile test."

Christmas has come and gone, so what was it? A beautiful vase?

"We'll find out what the surprise is, and we'll deal with it very successfully. Let's see what happens. Everybody's got surprises for me — but let's see what happens," Trump said. "I handle them as they come along."

In other Trump-and-Christmas news: "Psychiatry expert says Trump’s rambling Merry Christmas rant includes three signs of serious mental impairment."

Here's the rant in question:



Do you see the signs? Let me help you. The signs are:

– slurred speech
– semantic paraphasia (inserting wrong word)
– phonemic paraphasia (combining words to form a likely nonsense word)

The purported "phonemic paraphasia" is right at the beginning. He says "And let me begin by wishing you a beautiful" and switches, in the middle of "beautiful" to "look, do you remember this?" If you just clip out the "beautiful" to "look" segment, it sounds like silly nonsense — abyooteefyoowoodlook....



... but it's rank dishonesty to view that as the kind of mental deficiency where a person is saying nonwords as if they were words.

I did enjoy looking up the word "paraphasia" in Wikipedia, because I learned:

The term was apparently introduced in 1877 by the German-English physician Julius Althaus in his book on Diseases of the Nervous System, in a sentence reading, "In some cases there is a perfect chorea or delirium of words, which may be called paraphasia".

I'm always happy to encounter another Althouse/Althaus.